WPI team finds solutions in central Guatemala

Sunday

Jan 20, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Michael Puttré CORRESPONDENT

Indoor plumbing is one of the marvels of the modern world, but it is missing in many of the world's rural corners.

One of those remote communities, in central Guatemala, has plenty of clean drinking water — during the rainy season. In the height of the dry season, the 280 or so largely Mayan residents of the village of Guachthu'uq have to carry water, on foot, from the base of the mountain, day after day, until the autumn rains return.

A group of five engineering students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, accompanied by a professor and a professional engineer serving as mentors, spent 12 days this month showing this remote community how to keep fresh water on hand year-round.

The team represented the WPI student chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA, a nonprofit organization founded at in 2002 with the mission of pairing teams of volunteer engineering students and mentors with communities in developing countries to solve fundamental health and quality-of-life problems. Since 2008, the WPI chapter has been working with Guachthu'uq, in the Verapaz region of Guatemala.

“The rainy season gives them more water than they could possibly use, and the dry season provides barely any,” said student Christopher Sontag, a junior studying electrical and computer engineering. “The problem is giving them water for the whole year.”

Guachthu'uq is a collection of about 40 homes, most of which are rudimentary one-room dwellings with corrugated tin roofs. The community is essentially off the grid in terms of plumbing, electricity and other infrastructure.

“Up on the mountain and in Guachthu'uq, there were challenges at every turn,” said Alexandra Vresilovic, a senior studying civil and environmental engineering. The trek up to the community from San Cristóbal, where the team stayed with local families, was an arduous 45 minutes on foot.

“Even though I was struggling with my little backpack, there were women older than 70 and children younger than 8 walking with water, food or firewood,” she said.

The water source, however, is polluted with runoff, sewage and contaminates from local industry, including a tannery, according to Creighton Peet, Adjunct Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary and Global studies and a faculty advisor for the WPI chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Many of the village's adult men are away from home, he said, working at jobs to earn money.

Initially, the WPI team wanted to devise a centralized rain catchment system for the entire community, but terrain constraints and social issues worked against this.

Matthew Gamache, a water quality engineer with the Cambridge-based engineering firm CDM Smith and a WPI graduate, said conditions on the mountain work against the construction of artificial reservoirs or cisterns.

“The rock is thoroughly fractured, so any accumulated surface water rapidly drains away,” he said.

Also, the idea of a common collection and storage system did not fit with the spread-out nature of the community and complex rules governing land ownership.

“Nobody really owns the land, but at the same time, everybody does,” Mr. Gamache said. “We talked to a lawyer to see if land issues could be worked out for a community tank: 'No.' ”

So, under the concept of the rain catchment system, the roofs of individual houses would serve to channel rainwater into gutters and PVC piping, and then into 2,500-liter heavy plastic storage tanks. The storage tanks would sit on top of cement bases so the water could be extracted from spigots on the bottom.

The WPI team arrived with designs and procured the materials locally, most of which were available in San Cristóbal.

“The materials we use are entirely from local sources so the family members will be able to repair and easily maintain their systems over the years,” Mr. Sontag said.

A local partner, the University of Cobán, has provided important scientific and on-site support. A geologist at the university has been keeping monthly rainfall data for the region stretching back 30 years. The WPI team has used the data to construct spreadsheet models of how much rainwater can be collected from a given tin-roofed structure equipped with a catchment system.

“We have created a dynamic rainwater model to fit each different house with a unique system that will fulfill the household's own unique needs,” Mr. Sontag said.

The goal of the most recent trip was to install rain catchment systems on two pilot homes.

“The students do most of the work; we mentors just try to keep them on track,” said Patricia Austin, a water quality engineer with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation's Division of Water Supply Protection at Wachusett Reservoir who traveled with the WPI students for the pilot installation. “We act as a sounding board, but it's really an all-student project.”

If all goes well with the pilot program, the WPI chapter of Engineers Without Borders plans to return next year to install catchment systems on more houses in Guachthu'uq. Eventually, the locals will be able to design, build and maintain the systems themselves without any additional intervention. Even better, perhaps one day experts from Guachthu'uq will help solve water problems in other communities in the region and beyond.

“Engineers Without Borders requires as much, if not more, time from my schedule than any of my WPI classes,” Ms. Vresilovic said. The WPI chapter has to raise all the funds needed for their activities. The cost of the January trip to Guachthu'uq was about $12,000.

In addition, students participate in the organization without earning any course credits. “To tell the truth, I see much more of a humanistic application of my education through Engineers Without Borders than anything in my curriculum,” she said. “This project has become a huge part of my life, and I feel that my outlook has changed greatly.”